Friday, 9 August 2013

My unhappiness with happiness

Relatively recently,
happiness seems to have come to prominence in policy discussions. David Cameron (initially) made
it a centrepiece of the Coalition Government agenda, emblematic of the ‘new
approaches to government’ promised in the Programme
for Government.

This week ‘happiness’ has come my way twice. (Spoiler Alert – it didn’t make me very
happy.)

First, I read Brighton and Hove’s (vaguely) new Public
Health annual report. It’s ostensibly
structured around the theme of happiness, with the title “Happiness: the
eternal pursuit”.

Schwandt was writing about how we can understand the
commonly noticed dip in self-reported life satisfaction around middle age by
looking at the discrepancy between life expectations and reality. Put in cartoonish terms, we become unhappy in
middle age because we realise that all those youthful dreams that kept us going
through our teens, twenties and thirties are no longer achievable. Life ain’t what we’d hoped. By older age, though, we’ve reconciled
ourselves to failure, and even predict worse outcomes than tend to happen – so
we’re pleasantly surprised. It really
does pay to lower expectations, it seems.

So why does all this talk of happiness make me unhappy?

Well, there’s a number of reasons. (Obviously.
I couldn’t be brief.)

First, we could take Hannes Schwandt’s article as meaning
that, rationally speaking, we’re not very good at judging what might be thought
of as our own objective health or wellbeing.
That is, it’s our expectations of the world around us and our situation
that make us ‘happy’ as much as those actual conditions.

If this form of subjective ‘happiness’ is an aim of
government, I’m immediately reminded of something else that makes me unhappy:
fear of crime. Community Safety
Partnerships and Police forces have as their strategic objectives making
people feel safer. Now, I don’t want to rehearse arguments that
other people will understand much better than me, but the point is: PCSOs (to
take the example linked to here)
seem to exist as much to make people feel
safe as to help ensure their safety.
A key role for PCSOs, according to the Met, is ‘closing the gap between the reality and
fear of crime’.

I know that an idea of ‘objective’ wellbeing might seem
ridiculous, but I think it helps to highlight that this is what government is
actually dealing with most of the time: a set of conditions, or proxies (such
as health or income), not actual ‘happiness’.

But perhaps, if happiness is the ‘eternal pursuit’, and
national wellbeing tells one more about the country than national income, then
these conditions and proxies government has some influence on are means to the
end of ensuring ‘the
greatest happiness of the greatest number’.

In actual fact, Schwandt’s analysis seems to suggest that a
more direct manipulation of people’s happiness would be more effective. He notes that we get used to our situation
(e.g. level of income) and our happiness adjusts accordingly. I’d have thought, therefore, the most reliable
way to change our levels of happiness might be through some kind of ‘mindfulness’
programme that encouraged us to live in the moment – changing how we orient
ourselves to the conditions we find ourselves in, rather than altering those
conditions.

That is, you could say that if subjective happiness is government’s
aim, and we know that people are unhappy when their hopes and dreams are
dashed, we could make people happier by making them dream smaller. I find this pretty discomfiting though.

Paul Willis’, Learning
to Labour, a classic ethnographic work of young working-class Britons
in the 1970s, outlines ways in working-class boys make a virtue of the (apparent)
necessity of doing a working-class job.

As Willis puts it in the opening sentences:

The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle
class jobs is why others let them. The difficult
thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why
they let themselves.

In this case, having some disconnect between one’s
aspirations and the most likely reality would be a positive thing, regardless
of the ‘unhappiness’ involved. Perhaps
people would be right to be unhappy at doing certain jobs, or facing particular
living conditions. You might even talk
about false
consciousness.

This has particular implications for public health teams if
we take to heart the points in this
recently published article, which argues that public health hasn’t taken
seriously enough the structural factors behind health inequalities, preferring
instead to focus on individual ‘healthy behaviours’.

And this doesn’t need to be about a left-wing conscience. Those on the entrepreneurial right could
embrace this wish for some kind of disconnect; where else does the ‘entrepreneurial’
or ‘aspirational’ spirit so beloved of many on the right come from? In fact, what else is aspiration but an
unhappiness with the status quo?

This discomfort raises the fundamental question: is
happiness really, as Brighton and Hove’s public health team tells us, ‘the
eternal pursuit’? Or perhaps more
importantly, should it be?

And in turn, this raises the more fundamental question of,
well, what do we actually mean by happiness?

Of course we might mean something more like Aristotle’s ‘eudaimonia’, which I would approximately
translate as ‘fulfilment’. This sort of concept
could be compatible with the Millian preference for unhappy
philosophising. It could also come
pretty close to the Protestant Ethic, whereby we praise God by working hard to
fulfil our potential in the God-given skills we’ve got.

In any case, whether in Aristotle or Mill, there’s an
understanding that quite what this means might vary from person to person. Moreover, there’s various ‘pleasures’ we’d
need to balance (the ‘binge’ against the hangover). So whether we mean pleasure or fulfilment, if
‘happiness’ is going to be the key duty of government, we probably ought to
have a think about what goes into the concept.*

However, in the case of the Brighton public health work, we don’t
need to have this debate. It turns out
that all the basic form of analysis is the same as previous years, and ‘happiness’
is just a way to structure a discussion of familiar stats on STI incidence,
drug-related deaths, numbers of opiate users, prevalence of smoking during pregnancy
and so forth. It just so happens that
all these things that public health teams have always cared about fit neatly with
‘happiness’: people who are less promiscuous, drink less, take drugs less often
and so forth so that they are publicly healthy are happier (e.g. p.47).

In this way of presenting health as central to happiness, the
Brighton report isn’t too far from David Cameron’s point early in
the introduction of the ‘happiness index’, when he admitted that he would be
concentrating on economic policy, because without money people wouldn’t be able
to do the things they enjoy.

Or is it the other way round? On page 4 of the Brighton report the suggestion is that ‘positive
emotions’ make you healthy, and that’s why we should be encouraging ‘happiness’. By this reasoning, happiness is a means to an
end – public health.

Either way, I can’t really see that using the concept of ‘happiness’
helps us understand the issues any better.
Is health a good in itself? Is
community? Or do we need to explain that
people are ‘happier’ with them? Rather
than them enhancing my wellbeing, I think I’d start to find community and
religion a bit depressing, actually, if the reason I was participating was
to squeeze a few extra years out of my life.
(Now that really would be the instrumentalism in friendship that Winlow and Hall talk
about.)

So, bluntly, there’s no clarity around what ‘happiness’
means. I’d go as far as to suggest that ‘happiness’
is simply a way of obscuring genuine value judgements and balancing of
competing claims – and that this sort of use raises more questions than it
answers.

In fact, this is precisely what the Director of Public
Health says about the report – as a boast.
He claims that readers will be ‘relieved’ (not ‘happy’?) that the report
contains more questions than answers. Personally, I’d like a few more answers.

About Me

I live and work in Dorchester, a beautiful town in Dorset not far from the south coast.
I’m a Senior Health Programme Advisor within the team that commissions drug and alcohol treatment services through Public Health Dorset, which operates across Bournemouth, Poole and rural Dorset.
I'm also a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at Bournemouth University.
How did I get here? Well I did a PhD, also at Bournemouth University, looking at ‘binge’ drinking in Bournemouth and thinking about how class and gender are part of how people understand their own and other people’s drinking. (Search on eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk)
After finishing the PhD I moved to London for a couple of years and worked for the Russell Group of universities, dealing most closely with issues of community engagement, widening participation and, unexpectedly, immigration.
When an opportunity came up to head back down to Dorset and work on drug and alcohol issues, I grabbed it with both hands.
I'm on Twitter: @WilliamHaydock